[sdiy] Lockout / DRM chips?

[David Kantowitz]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2026 at 1:24 PM Eric Honour via Synth-diy <
synth-diy at synth-diy.org> wrote:

> The thing about walled gardens is that some people want the additional
> convenience.
>
> What if, instead of bricking when faced with a failed handshake, the
> handshake brought additional benefits?
>
> What I'm envisioning is a backplane connection exposed on Specially
> Protected Modules that does nothing, but mirrors the jacks on the front of
> the module (just on a ribbon cable).  Then you have a module that accepts
> those ribbon cables and exposes a local wifi network serving up a patch
> management webapp.
>

This approach seems far more appealing: provide increased value to the user
for staying inside the garden.

If you can successfully do that, then the standard legalistic approaches to
IP protection become more useful: contracts, associations, certification,
branding, etc.

DRM itself suddenly becomes useful and, as an added bonus, the
technical quality of the DRM is no longer relevant. DRM doesn't need to
present a deep technical challenge; instead it makes the people who violate
the DRM criminals under DMCA/WIPO/whatever laws.
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